Brexit: Not far now, to Sugarcandy Mountain!

"The pigs had an even harder struggle to counteract the lies put about by
Moses, the tame raven. Moses, who was Mr. Jones's especial pet, was a
spy and a tale-bearer, but he was also a clever talker. He claimed to
know of the existence of a mysterious country called Sugarcandy
Mountain, to which all animals went when they died. It was situated
somewhere up in the sky, a little distance beyond the clouds, Moses
said. In Sugarcandy Mountain it was Sunday seven days a week, clover was
in season all the year round, and lump sugar and linseed cake grew on
the hedges. The animals hated Moses because he told tales and did no
work, but some of them believed in Sugarcandy Mountain, and the pigs had
to argue very hard to persuade them that there was no such place."

"Anything
as complex and challenging as leaving the European Union will present
significant problems. Therefore, you do not need a focus group to tell
you that, when confronting the prospect of an EU referendum, voters will
need to be reassured that a choice to leave is not a leap in the dark.

That much has been obvious to anyone who has even begun to look at the
issue. More specifically, I have long argued that we would need to
produce a credible exit plan. Without that – as I was writing in May 2008, over seven years ago – our opposition would rely on the status quo
to support their case and, in particular, the assertion that there is
no alternative (TINA) to our membership of the European Union.

It actually took five years, until June 2013, for the IEA to trigger the process of producing an exit plan, with its Brexit Prize.
But so badly managed was the competition – and then ultimately rigged –
that the winning entries added nothing to the debate and have
disappeared into the obscurity they rightly deserve."

Sugarcandy Mountain!

There is no such thing as "Sugarcandy Mountain" but there is such as thing as people who make a good living for themselves selling it:-

"In Mr
Hannan's world, however, time has stood still. The idea of a staged exit
is rigorously excluded while he rehearses the same issues he was
writing about ten years ago,
in terms that have scarcely changed. Laboriously, he goes on a hunt for
the ideal "model", with a tedious and somewhat flawed review of the
Norway-EEA and Swiss arrangements.

This leads him then to conclude that Norway "gets a better deal than
Britain currently does", and – quite wrongly – that Switzerland gets "a
better deal than Norway". And upon this flawed assumption, he then drops
into an exposition of the better deal fallacy
as he assert that "a post-EU Britain, with 65 million people to
Switzerland's eight million and Norway's five, should expect something
better yet"."

"One of the converts to this idea is Ruth Lea. She was formerly an advocate of the so-called "Swiss option"
(page 27), so she now stands – without explanation - completely at odds
with her earlier position. But we have also seen an intervention from Global Britain."

There is a telling difference between us lesser mortals and men such as John Redwood. We believe that we need the 419 pages of Flexcit,
and something like three years of study, to define how we leave the EU.
Redwood believes he can do it in a mere 417 words, contradicting the
bulk of what we have to say in the process.

Both
writers take exception to Mr Redwood's many assertions, including the
most egregious of them which have him declaring that "the Leave campaign
does not want the UK to seek a Norway style deal", that in order to
leave "the UK could simply amend the 1972 European Communities Act" and
that, after leaving, we could "simply rely on World Trade Organisation
membership to stop tariffs and other barriers being imposed"."

"Amazingly,
the Eurosceptic "aristocracy" simply can't get their soggy little
brains round the idea that it would be extremely unwise to attempt a
"big bang" separation from the EU. They also have difficulty with the
idea that the two year period allowed for the initial Article 50 exit
negotiations isn't long enough to broker a bespoke free trade agreement –
which can take 5-15 years to conclude."

"Sugarcandy Mountain, that happy country where we poor animals shall rest
for ever from our labours!"

"My answer on what the alternative plan should be called is "WTO Plus".
All other benefits - democratic control, border control, economic
control - flow from it. It is a simple and genuine alternative plan. So,
you may ask, what on earth is it?

My plan for the UK outside of the EU combines a guaranteed basic
trade deal based on current World Trade Organisation arrangements with a
better free trade deal on top.

The basic deal is guaranteed
whatever happens, as the UK and EU are both World Trade Organisation
members in their own right and must follow its rules or be hauled into
an international court.

This worst case scenario would mean
tariffs on some goods. But I think we can do better than that. There are
already indications that German car manufacturers would ensure their
government does not impose tariffs on UK cars – why penalise BMW-owned
Minis and Rolls Royces? There would be such demand from all sides for a
better deal"

"In the middle of the summer Moses the raven suddenly reappeared on the
farm, after an absence of several years. He was quite unchanged, still
did no work, and talked in the same strain as ever about Sugarcandy
Mountain. He would perch on a stump, flap his black wings, and talk by
the hour to anyone who would listen. "Up there, comrades," he would say
solemnly, pointing to the sky with his large beak– "up there, just on
the other side of that dark cloud that you can see– there it lies,
Sugarcandy Mountain, that happy country where we poor animals shall rest
for ever from our labours!" He even claimed to have been there on one
of his higher flights, and to have seen the everlasting fields of clover
and the linseed cake and lump sugar growing on the hedges. Many of the
animals believed him. Their lives now, they reasoned, were hungry and
laborious; was it not right and just that a better world should exist
somewhere else? A thing that was difficult to determine was the attitude
of the pigs towards Moses. They all declared contemptuously that his
stories about Sugarcandy Mountain were lies, and yet they allowed him to
remain on the farm, not working, with an allowance of a gill of beer a
day."

So you see it's quite useful having a clever talker persuading people that Paradise is just around the corner if they continue "working harder for a better Britain!" supporting their betters on such matters...